1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus to and from which various image data is input and output via a storage medium, a method of controlling the same, a program, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent trend of digitization of copying machines, multifunction machines having a plurality of functions, for example, a copying machine also capable of facsimile transmission using a scanner and a printer thereof, a PDL (Page Description Language) printer, etc., have been put to practical use.
Such a multifunction machine allows not only execution of a single function such as copying function, facsimile function, PDL print function, etc., but also execution of a combination of a plurality of functions, for example, transmission of rasterized PDL image data by facsimile.
Furthermore, by connecting a multifunction machine to a LAN (Local Area Network), the functions of the multifunction machine can be used from a computer, etc.
Such a multifunction machine incorporates a hard disk with a large capacity for storing image data from a scanner, rasterized PDL image data, documents received via facsimile, etc., so that desired functions can be provided by combining various functions including printing of the stored image data, transmission of the image data via facsimile, and transferring the image data to a computer via a network.
Furthermore, an image forming apparatus has been proposed in which a finisher is incorporated in a printer of a copying machine, and two pages of image of an original document are formed on each face of a sheet so that the pages will be in order when a plurality of sheets are center folded and saddle stitched (binding layout). That is, the proposed image forming apparatus has a layout function for forming a plurality of pages of image on one sheet.
However, in the binding layout function of the conventional image forming apparatus, it is desired that the resolutions of the plurality of pages of image data be the same. A possible approach is to convert the resolutions so that the resolutions of all the image data match. However, this approach requires a conversion circuit and a page memory for converting resolutions before image formation, which is likely to incur excessive processes and additional cost.